It’s been a busy year though updates on the site don’t reflect that very well. Turns out we were targeted by some not nice folks that kept our site locked down a lot over the last year and generally wasted a lot of our web guru’s time. We think we have that ironed out so we should start posting things here again more for more detailed stuff than what is on Facebook.

We started out 2017 with a the goal being a year to get things done. Our goal to not over promise but to let our work stand for itself. As such here’s what we have to show for the year (all the external projects are under NDA).

Getting back to it

Josh has gotten back to taking gigs and has been working jobs since the summer and had a great time doing a facial rigging class with Rigging Dojo and plans to do more with them next year. David and Josh both have continued to work on tools and worked some jobs together.

Sphinx!

We set up a Sphinx doc system and have been fleshing it out over the year as we’ve updated tools. We feel this is a great foundation on which to continue to build and provide better support for the large assortment of tools we are continuing to develop.

New tools and bits in 2017

We started this year with a 2.0 rewrite of much of our core code base as well as updating some old tools and doing new ones. We’ve made a lot of progress on this front just this year.

Toolbox 2.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/toolbox.html ) We redesigned the toolbox to be accessible by a top maya menu, marking menu and a ui. There are loads of functionality to be found and it continually updated

Locinator 2.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/locinator.html ) Took a stab at updating this with new tech developed and expanding features. This is a great tool for animators that need to track different things for short periods of time without finicky constraint setups. It’s one of our more popular tools.

cgmSnap 1.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/snaptools.html ) We spent a lot of time working out snapping things around as we’ve been working on our rigger and for jobs in general. First attempt at trying to expose those calls in a more useful format.

cgmJointTools 1.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/jointTools.html ) Having been huge fans for comet’s tool for years. There were a few things we wanted to add for our own use. Some of those key features being chain/curve splitting, planar orientation and more.

Marking Menu 2.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/markingmenu.html ) Taking the ideas from Morpheus 2.0’s marking menu work and expanding on that to a unified menu with different modes for rigging, animating and more.

cgmDynParentTool 1.0 – (http://docs.cgmonks.com/dynparenttool.html ) This tool allows you to easily setup point,point/orient and orient dynamic groups for controls for rigs as well as providing the tools to switch modes on the fly when animating. We use this all the time for rigging work.